The Town of DeWitt Protects Public Services with NAKIVO
Business Challenge
The Town of DeWitt is a town in Onondaga County, New York, USA. As of 2018, the town has a population of over 25,000 residents. The town is named after Major Moses DeWitt, who was a judge and a soldier. The Town of DeWitt is fortunate to have a prominent location in New York State. Industry and commerce have settled here due to the accessible transportation options of a regional airport, rail yards, the Route 90 east-west Thruway, north-south Route 81, and its proximity to Canada.
NetManageIT is a managed service provider (MSP) in the central New York area that has been servicing customers for over 25 years. The company has many municipal customers and is experienced in managing and servicing such customers. Dan Bender, a CTO at NetManagetIT, is the Lead Engineer who has been servicing the Town of DeWitt since 2011. The town’s infrastructure consists of two Microsoft Hyper-V hosts, one physical server for the police department, and ten virtual machines. Virtual machines store a wide variety of data and applications, including the main file server, a Linux server for archival purposes, a Microsoft Exchange server, a Microsoft SQL server for municipal applications, a terminal server, a monitoring server, and an application server running various apps. Governmental operations and the police department must be available 24/7, and the town must have a reliable disaster recovery solution. If systems are unavailable, the town will not be able to service the residents properly.
Previously, the Town of DeWitt relied on services of another VM backup and disaster recovery solution. Although the product’s performance was adequate for the town, the biggest disadvantage was the lack of backup support for physical servers and workstations. Developers had been working on adding this functionality for over a year, but progress was slow, and the product contained multiple bugs. Initially, the bar was set high because the previous product provided ease-of-use and good pricing. However, NAKIVO Backup & Replication turned out to be an excellent alternative for the Town of DeWitt. NAKIVO Backup & Replication proved to be more affordable and provided support for backup of physical servers and workstations.
Solution
NAKIVO Backup & Replication performs native, image-based, incremental, and application-aware backups for VMware, Hyper-V, Amazon EC2, Nutanix AHV environments, and for Windows/Linux physical servers and workstations. Moreover, the product offers SaaS backup for Microsoft Office 365. NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides granular recovery of files and application objects, recovery of full VMs, and instant recovery of physical machines from backups as VMware VMs.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication offers flexibility in installation options, as the product can be installed on Windows/Linux, deployed as a pre-configured virtual appliance, or installed on NAS devices. “NAKIVO Backup & Replication is one of the easiest products in terms of installation and usability, and I have used a bunch of major players in the same industry. There was a learning curve, but nothing drastic at all. We appreciate the flexibility of the numerous hardware platforms and methods to deploy the product. NAKIVO Backup & Replication is lightweight and does not take numerous resources,” says Dan.
With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the Town of DeWitt has physical backup capabilities and virtual backup capabilities in one solution. “We stagger all our backup jobs onsite and offsite to spread the load. We back up critical servers every few hours, and all offsite backup copy jobs are done nightly during non-business hours to reduce the load on the internet pipe. Global deduplication has been great, as we managed to save local and offsite storage space. With that, we reduced our storage costs, and that helped us immensely,” says Dan.
NAKIVO Backup & Replication allows the Town of DeWitt to perform seamless Windows Server backup, ensuring consistency of all applications and databases. Moreover, the product protects data stored on desktops and laptops. NAKIVO Backup & Replication features support for physical machines that allows organizations to perform backups of Windows 10-based PCs. Backup copy functionality allows the Town of DeWitt to have an extra copy of backups at an offsite location. With the product, you can copy backups from one backup repository to another without touching the source hosts or virtual machines.
Results
NAKIVO Backup & Replication provides the Town of DeWitt with ease-of-use, an affordable pricing model, virtual and physical backups under one roof. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, the town can back up critical virtual machines as well as physical servers and workstations. With global data deduplication, the town saved storage space and reduced storage costs. With backup copy functionality, the town can create and maintain copies of backups offsite. “With our previous product, we could not back up our physical servers and workstations. The biggest immediate benefit is that now we can back up our entire infrastructure with one solution. With NAKIVO Backup & Replication, we not only keep public services running but also save a couple of thousand dollars per year,” says Dan.
About Town of Dewitt
The Town of DeWitt is located in upstate New York, United States. The Town of DeWitt is approximately 40 square miles in size and has approximately 124 miles of maintained paved surface streets. The town includes the Village of East Syracuse and the hamlets of Jamesville and Collamer, with residential areas of charming older neighborhoods, contemporary homes, condominiums, and upscale newer subdivisions. Residents of DeWitt have excellent public and private education choices at all levels, from preschool programs through post-graduate studies. The town also maintains 13 parks and green spaces, with many of the trails available for year-round activities. For more information, visit www.townofdewitt.com.